


we were so

by Confabulatrix



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Codependency, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Mildly Dubious Consent, Pseudoscience, Psychological Trauma, Stick Fighting, The Author Regrets Everything, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-19
Updated: 2014-11-19
Packaged: 2018-02-26 05:56:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2640620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Confabulatrix/pseuds/Confabulatrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is victory, not a happy ending.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we were so

**Author's Note:**

  * For [quigonejinn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/gifts).



> I am so, so sorry.

 

_they say love is a virtue don't they?_

 

Eight hours and eleven minutes after they close the Breach, after the choppers pull them shivering off Raleigh's pod, after the decontamination procedures, after the medical examination, after that hazy, bright roar and crush of cheering and congratulations, after five hours of exhausted sleep pressed in close enough together in his bunk almost to bruise, Mako Mori fucks Raleigh Becket.

She starts it, waking needy and resentful to feel him receding back into his own skin, his own head, pulling away like the tide going out, and bites him. Just like that, he comes back in, storm surge and curiosity, and he's smug when he slides down her body and parts her legs, a grinning glow in the back of her head while he fucks her open with his tongue, with his fingers. It's not enough; she drags him back up and rolls him. It's not a graceful process in the tiny bunk, she knocks her elbow into the wall, he winces with her, but Mako wants him in her and she gets what she wants.

She's not a virgin, but only just, and she's not ready enough for it to feel good when she rides him in (relief doesn't mean good, it's just relief), but the press of his mind beneath hers, and below that the press of her mind beneath his, between that is good, to him she's tight and wet and hot and _good_ , and she can work from that. He likes the quick jerks of her hips, likes watching her take him in, likes the change in her breathing when he sets the pad of his thumb against her clit and rubs sparks of pleasure into her. It's almost good for her when he tenses and comes, straining up into her. She likes seeing him come undone.

Forty minutes later, Raleigh fucks her, pushes her knees up and apart so they're around his ribs while he screws into her with long slow strokes that do feel good, that fill her up, that ache in every good way. He tells her to touch herself, tells her to come, that he wants to feel her come on his cock. She does, then he fucks into her harder, not enough to hurt, just enough to give her what she needs, and she comes again. When he comes a second time, deep inside her, she digs her nails into his shoulders and remembers for him how long it's been, and how glad he is that it's her, here, now ( _onlyyounow, onlyyouforever,_ he promises).

In the tiny washroom attached to his room, Mako wets a cloth to clean herself, but first slicks her hand up between her legs and studies their commingled come between her fingers. It occurs to her to be particularly grateful to the doctor who prescribed the birth control pills nearly two months ago, before the decision was made to retrieve Lady Danger's prodigal pilot, because unrelated copilots tended to fall into bed together, and as no one knew Danger better than Mako she seemed the fairly obvious choice. Of course, then Sensei brought back Mr. Becket, but she kept taking her daily pill in secret, because nothing was certain, nothing was set in stone, because Sensei might yet change his mind about her piloting, and he hardly needed to know something so slight and so embarrassing.

Then Mako remembers: that now, there is no need for keeping secrets from Sensei, embarrassing or otherwise, because Sensei is dead, scattered ash on the ocean floor.

Her throat closes up against the sound that tries to escape her, her lungs seize, and when she takes a breath at last all she can smell is Raleigh and sex. She feels dirty, suddenly unclean, too-aware of Raleigh's sweat on her skin and his semen in her cunt and also how, just shy of eleven hours ago, she still had a father.

In the shower, she turns up the water hot enough to hurt, and it's still not enough, even scrubbing at her skin as hard as she can, to undo the sense memory of Raleigh's hands on her or the ache from his cock in her or the way she thought less than an hour ago that she was in love with him.

What did she say to Raleigh about respect? What was it? She has no right to speak of respect. She wants to be sick at herself, at her thoughtlessness, at her selfish disregard and disrespect, at her _daring_ to think about the future, picturing Raleigh there as naturally as breathing, without once thinking of the man who'd paid his life twice over to see she had a future at all. She has never lived in a world without Stacker Pentecost; how dare she forget him so easily, less than a day, less than twelve hours after he cleared a path _for the lady_.

Mako retches into the water, sobs and sinks to the floor, wishing she could sink into the center of the earth and cease to be entirely. She hopes the dead don't watch the living, that Sensei didn't see and doesn't know how little of a lady she really is, that he isn't disappointed.

That is where Raleigh finds her. He turns off the water, reaches for a towel, reaches for her. She pulls into herself, flinches away from his hands. " _Don't touch me!_ " she screams. " _Don't. Touch. ME._ "

He draws back, confused, but his mind in hers swells with concern, begs for understanding, crowds her head with the need to erase the distance air and skin and living in separate bodies puts between them. _what'swrongmako, whatcanido, whatdidido_ beats in her brain like a pulse, _what'swrong, letmefixit, letmetry_. She looks at him and he staggers from the transference.

Raleigh says her name. The ocean in his head pushes against her mind, demands entry, like he thinks he can drown her grief with enough love. The drift between them pulls taut, nearly as strong as when they were together in the conn-pod, as full and bright as it was together in the sunlight on the water, and Mako craves it and hates it, hates herself for wanting it. She had wanted it so badly she _forgot_.

She pushes back so hard it hurts (good, it should hurt, that's only right) and screams. _getoutgetoutgetoutofmyhead.get.out.GET.OUT._

Raleigh goes. The drift remains.

Her grief rises in her like a storm. The leading wall of it comes over her and breaks. Mako snaps in on herself, pulls in a breath, and lets it take her.

 

 

Sixteen hours after she loses her father, Mako wakes up in her own room with damp hair and a damp pillow, a bottle of water and two acetaminophen at the ready for her headache. She's wearing a t-shirt that isn't hers and her skin feels sunburnt, hot and too tight, like it might crack at the slightest movement. She curls up in the miserable dark and presses her face against the cool side of the pillow through a few hiccoughing breaths. Her pulse thuds in her sinuses and her eyes burn, but she doesn't cry again.

Beneath her mind, like the bright patient surface of the sea in a calm, Raleigh waits.

 

 

One week after Stacker Pentecost and Chuck Hansen clear a path for the lady, after ninety-six rigid awful hours spent sweating out the drift hangover alone, after retching and shaking and refusing to open her door and dabbing salve into the circles her nails carved into her palms every time she blinked and briefly saw the world through Raleigh's eyes, after dreaming his uneasy dreams of dying and of the dead, Mako attends to her messages, including Tendo's forwarded regrets and an inquiry on her intentions for the Marshal's personal effects.

 _I'll handle it_ , she replies.

Before she ventures out, Mako rests her forehead against the cool of her door and exhales, then inhales ( _like this_ , Sensei mimed, in the Shatterdome three days after Onibaba, _ichi, ni, san, shi_ , but then she'd corrected him, _ī_ _e_ _Ranger-san,_ _ichi, ni, san,_ yon), holds ( _go, roku, shichi?_ — _hai_ ), and exhales ( _hachi, kyū, jū_ —in, hold, out, and again, like he had learned from Tamsin, like she had learned for her anxiety attacks after San Francisco— _arigatō gozaimasu, Mori-san_ ). Mako breathes like Sensei taught her and opens the door to find Raleigh waiting for her.

He wears his wary hope on his face, and when he says her name there's still reverence, if not the breathless adoration from before, when they—

She nods, passes him, and keeps her eyes forward when he falls into step behind her, closer than appropriate for a subordinate officer but not so close as to imply any sort of claim. He doesn't ask where she's going, just as she doesn't need to ask if he intends to follow: he's still in her head, and she in his. _Still_ , even after a drift hangover that lasted nearly three times the length of the estimated average, more than twice the outmost recorded limit, a fact Mako might find rather disturbing if she weren't more bothered by how bothered Raleigh _isn't_.

Raleigh trails her through the corridors good-naturedly, without any trace of reproach, even though she knows he knows the hangover was so much more difficult than it needed to be for her refusal to spend it with him. She knows he arched through the same electric lines of nerve misfires she did and rode out the same fever spikes, and that he waited blindly whenever her vision became his because she kept her eyes squeezed shut each time. There should be some resentment in him, Mako thinks, if just for the times he was incapacited because unlike her, he tried to work his way through it.

Actually, for all that she can feel the every atom of Raleigh's body in precise relation to her own, she can't properly make out his frame of mind. There's no resentment, but neither is there a particularly strong impression of anything else. Mako wonders if maybe they're not really ghost drifting anymore, if perhaps the feeling of empty space where she got so used to the feeling of his mind isn't just residual pattern echo, maybe he can't hear her either anymore—

"I can," Raleigh says aloud, _icanmako_ echoing right behind it, the words and thought so sudden and unexpected Mako freezes where she is, which by coincidence is just a few doors down from Sensei's quarters. Raleigh stops with her, stops like he anticipated she'd do so, and watches her. She looks back at him, studies his face, his posture, how his thumbs hook in at his beltloops; she can't read him.

"You don't have to do this right now, you know," Raleigh says, like he doesn't feel how her pulse picked up. He nods and inclines his shoulder at Sensei's door and says, "It'll all still be there later."

( _It's respect_ , she said to him, two weeks ago.)

Mako says nothing about respect, but she sees the barest hint of a flinch on Raleigh's face when she says instead, "Later won't make it hurt any less." And what would he know, she remembers how Sensei took her back to the house in Nakatane, to sort through her old life for what she wanted to carry into the new, before her grandfather and the aunts who didn't want her took it all away (and in turn were taken by Kaiju Blue and a tsunami six months later). But then she remembers too Raleigh's brother and feels a shred of shame that her first thought after is _Good_ , that a part of her is pleased that he should know what this feels like, to pick through the debris of someone else's life for salvage.

The war took Sensei's family in attrition piece-by-piece, swept Raleigh's out to sea one at a time, seized hers all at once without warning. They are ( _were_ ) the last ones standing, and Mako doesn't know how to explain to Raleigh how important it is to do this now, before anything else, so she doesn't explain. She takes the last few steps to Sensei's door, exhales, inhales, holds, exhales again, and opens the door.

Sensei left a clean suit out, over the precise lines and corners of his fresh-made bed. With it, he left a page of instructions, one line item after another neatly written, Sensei was prepared, Sensei made arrangements so neither she nor anyone else would be required, Sensei considered all the contingencies, Sensei left her everything, which is no consolation because _he left her behind_ —

Mako breathes like Sensei taught her (the day he realized she'd be all right, he told her later; the day he realized he was in _so_ much trouble, Tamsin told her later), but still bares her teeth at the tentative brush of _mako?_ and the ring of Raleigh's boots against the stairs.

Raleigh's face shifts through expressions too brief to categorize when she tells him to get out, and he goes without a word or thought of protest. She thinks she should apologize, later, when she's finished here, but Raleigh's lack of... anything, his non-response, resolves that she won't. She is grieving, she knows this, grief provides any number of excuses, but Raleigh should be hurt. Mako lived in his head with him, she could find his vulnerable points blindfolded and at a distance, so she knows: he should feel hurt, for _now_ , for the hangover, for the way she pushed him out before that, but there's _nothing there_.

Raleigh waits for her just outside Sensei's door like a held breath, overdue to be exhaled, and no sign he'll be letting go ( _go, roku, shichi, hachi, kyū..._ )

 

 

One month after Pitfall, after the funerals and the speeches and the ceremonies and the memorials (so many memorials) and the parades and the PR briefings and the Interview, after Raleigh locks his arms around hers and removes her from the Interview with a curt apology as the press secretary assigned to Pitfall's Heroes rushes in, after carrying her bodily out of the hangar and through the still silent corridors, Raleigh drops Mako on the floor of the kwoon and just barely dodges her first wild punch.

"ENOUGH," Raleigh snaps, yanking off the coat of his dress blues.

Mako hasn't had enough, not after that, but she'll take the more she wants from _this_. She bites down on her rage and kicks off her dress shoes in response. "They have no ri—"

"I. Don't. Care." He strips off his tie and starched shirt, careless of the buttons, and when he crosses the room toward the hanbō Mako's hand is already outstretched and ready; the drift hangs between them still. He throws it without looking and she catches it without thinking, plucks the hanbō from the air and turns with its movement to face him as he steps onto the mat.

Raleigh moves into _waki_ and waits, says, "Talk to me, Mako."

 _All you do is talk_ , Mako thinks, except that's not true anymore, is it? Before, he talked and talked and _talked_ , like he was afraid silence would drown him. After, after it was all she could do to push his clamor out, he gave her the space she wanted and _waited_ , stupidly patient, he left himself open and listened. For three weeks, he brought her anything she wanted while she grieved but offered nothing of himself, and what had been a relief at first grates now. He has thoughts, he _must_ have thoughts, but she can't parse anything from the background radiation of him in her head and she can't understand how anyone can be so vacant, _he never shut up_ before.

Raleigh waits for her in _waki_. He waits, and waits, so still and so infuriatingly blank, for her to start the conversation, so she snarls into _hassō_ and brings the fight to him.

He sidesteps her strike and counters it, bends and slides beneath her counterstrike, then around, and easy as breathing taps the butt of his hanbō between her shoulderblades. _one-zero_ , he says in her head, and goes silent again. Mako growls and turns with him, slashes blindly across where he should be and meets air. His hanbō caresses the back of her calf: _two-zero_.

Mako chases him across the mats and back again, and if not for the look of concentration on his face she would swear he's mocking her. He takes another point. She scores one by accident, overbalancing to correct her equilibrium. She can follow Raleigh with her eyes, she can feel where he is but not where he's going to be, and it's the Academy all over for her, unable to connect over and again; she finds she likes it even less on the pursuing (losing) end. Frustration makes her sloppy: her footwork goes to pieces for trying (failing) to anticipate Raleigh's, and so too the careful discipline Sensei helped her drill into her forms ( _More control, Miss Mori_ ) those times her temper boiled over its bounds.

She gives away another point in her careless fury, and there's no missing the smug curl of Raleigh's mouth when he lifts the hanbō from her collarbone and takes a step back.

_four-one. doyouwanttogoagain?_

Mako drops her hanbō with a shriek and throws herself at him. The air goes out of him with a whuff, but Raleigh absorbs her impact and turns her inertia against her. She flies face-first into the mat, pinned by the hanbō against her shoulders and the knee in the small of her back as he kneels over her.

_feelbetternow?_

She breathes through her gritted teeth, humiliated and shivering from adrenaline, and taps the mat twice with her left hand. Raleigh leans his weight back onto his heels and offers a hand to help her up. Mako lets out a long sigh and lets her mind go blank, to work on muscle memory alone when she twists his hand sharply to lock his elbow and _pulls_. She raises her knees for a fulcrum and uses his momentum as he used hers, so even as his back hits the floor she's in motion, setting her shins into the tender tendons of his biceps. It's unkind, but no one ever won a fight with kindness, and she takes no pleasure from the the way Raleigh's face twists in pain.

"What do you think you're doing," he grounds out.

 _Winning_ , Mako thinks, except she isn't, the sucking absence of him in her head stays silent. She clutches at his undershirt and leans in, like proximity will overcome the ragged pound of her pulse and the awful blackbody hum where he's supposed to be.

" _Where are you_?" she demands. _whereareyou whereareyou whereareyou where. are. you. WHERE._ He lives and breathes and walks and fights, he has a mind, he has thoughts, and she will find them if she has to tear through his skin to do it.

Raleigh clenches his jaw and says in Japanese, low and angry, " _More control, Miss Mori_."

She flinches back in horrified reflex and Raleigh moves, knifes up with his lower body and forces her off and across the mat. She lunges for him again, tackles him back into the mats before he can regain his feet and straddles his hips. As she fights with him to pin his arms down again she feels it, through the barest hiccup in his control: a thread of _desire_ like a lit fuse. The thought escapes her even as she grasps for it, but she can find it again, she has a way in now.

Mako abandons her war to capture his hands and instead leans forward into him, grasps at his hair and kisses his mouth hard enough to draw blood. Shock stills his whole body as she sucks at his lower lip, and even as she remembers she didn't kiss him _before_ he groans, opens his mouth to match her ferocity. She tastes his copper-tinted rage with satisfaction and deepens the kiss, rakes her nails across his scalp and revels in the contact and the brush of his presence ( _makomakomakoMAKOmako_ ) in her mind again.

She reaches for more, grinds her hips into his and tugs at the fine fractures in his bounding walls, craving more than the little he's given her back and determined still. She thinks without thinking, moves against him and shifts her hand to his belt buckle, and a confused disorienting instant later finds herself on her back, pinned again, Raleigh's forearm against her throat and his breath harsh against her lips.

"NO," he says, fury and desire flushing his face scarlet. She reaches for him again and he shoves away from her hard enough that her teeth click together when the back of her head hits the mat.

Mako pushes herself up onto her elbows and studies his defensive crouch, the poison glare on his face, the dark of his eyes from lust-blown pupils and asks, " _Why_?"

"You don't even want me," he spits out. "You want everything but you don't want _me_ , you can't _use_ people like that, Mako." Disgust and judgment sit heavy enough in his voice that Mako cringes a little, and when she opens her mouth to speak no words come to her. Raleigh watches her for a long moment, inscrutable but for the jumping muscles of his jaw, and at last shakes his head the minutest bit, and bitter as she has ever heard him says, "Fine."

 _Raleigh_ surges into her head like the leading wall of a hurricane, images and thoughts and emotions so fast and so fiercely it knocks the breath from her lungs. Her face, smiling at him on the escape pod; her face, flushed and panting as she rode him in his bunk; her face, peering out from under her umbrella on the helipad; her face, tear-streaked and troubled in sleep as he carried her back to her room. Frustration and grief and confusion and desire and anger and _love_ , suffocating in its intensity, enough love to stop her breath again. Disappointment and resentment that she isn't so perfect as he had thought. A shred of doubt, wondering if he was wrong to choose her, to give her everything of himself, chased with stubborn resolve to keep her anyway. More floods in, faster, beyond Mako's capacity to contain, and _still_ there's more to him and for a long moment it's as if her brain shorts out, dragged too long in his undertow.

And then, all at once, he's gone from her mind. Mako cries out at the sudden awful lack of him again and curls into herself to suck in short, hitching breaths. Her skin itches for ghosting with him, and she feels again the strange sensation of being in two places, of lying on the kwoon floor with a racing heart, and of standing stiffly with arms crossed.

When she looks up at him again, there's something like pity on Raleigh's face. She stares at him and wonders, distantly, how he can contain so much and keep it all from her.

 _practice_. He drops his arms and shrugs, a motion of dismissal rather than uncertainty and picks up his discarded clothing. As he makes to leave he pauses, looks over his shoulder. "I'll give you anything you want," he says, "once you figure out what that is. I'm ready whenever you are."

She doesn't follow him when he goes.

 

 

Three months after Mako becomes an orphan for the second time, after the world tour, after endless champagne and plush hotel rooms with adjoining doors they never open, after coming home in time to learn home's been decommissioned and scheduled to be returned to the civilian government of Hong Kong by National Day, she pulls Raleigh stumbling into her bunk, sipping cheap whisky kisses from his mouth. They collapse together on her muggy sheets in the dark and as he lazily grazes her collarbone with his stubble the affectionate tipsy haze of Raleigh's presence in her mind resolves just a little clearer, a little brighter.

She tips his face to bring his gaze to hers. _whatdoyouwant?_

 _you_ , he thinks simply.

Mako tilts her head back to show him her throat and moves his hand from where he's tracing circles at her hip over the cotton of her tee, across and under the hem of her sweatpants and opens her thighs for him. After, he tastes his fingers while she rolls the condom over his cock, and they exhale together when he slides thickly into her.

He's slow to seek his own pleasure, content to move in short grinding thrusts, to fit deep in her the way she likes, so she writhes through her orgasms and gasps, wrung out and sated when he finally comes as well. She runs her nails through the hair at his nape until his breathing evens and he drowses off, and considers the butterfly flickers of his dreams behind her eyes.

Mako wanted him in her head again and she gets what she wants, one way or another.

(He's not the person she wants, not the person she would have chosen, but he's the person she has, the person Sensei brought her, and she'll take what she can.

 _Sensei would be so disappointed_ , she thinks. Perhaps it's fortunate he doesn't have to live with the knowledge of it.)

 

 

Seven months after they began drifting and never stopped, after the fighting and the fucking and the long sullen flight over the Pacific, after the tests and scans and diagnostics, Dr. Sheehan looks at Mako and says to Raleigh, "They should never have brought you back into the program." Her brown eyes flick back down to his chart and profile and she makes a noise of disgust in her throat. "Hell, they never should have let you leave in the first place, we would have caught this sooner."

Helena Sheehan is the foremost (truthfully, only) expert on drift pathology on the planet, particularly after Lightcap and D'onofrio went down with Brawler Yukon in '22. Every survivor of the first trimester at Kodiak knows her name and every ranger and pons tech knows why they should, they've heard the stories about Year Zero, so when Dr. Sheehan speaks, people listen.

"Don't get me wrong," she says, "I'm grateful my kid has a future beyond the fifth grade to look forward to but they never should have let you test for a new copilot, much less step into a Jaeger."

She shows them the six-years-old notes from the doctors at Anchorage SD, from the month they kept him sedated after the seizures stopped because his brain kept trying to make connections with a pons and a partner that weren't there. She explains the purpose of the post-deployment functional scan ("which you refused, _idiot_ ") and the legion tests that should have been performed at his return to the PPDC and weren't.

"I was fine!" Raleigh protests.

"No," Dr. Sheehan says, "you weren't."

She pulls Mako aside at the end of the appointment to ask how she's doing, and at first Mako misunderstands the question to be the same one she's heard for months: _how are you after the Marshal_? Mako answers the same way she has for months and lies, says that it has been difficult, but she'll be all right, because what she hasn't said is how sometimes she can't even look at Raleigh because all she sees is the way he followed Sensei out of the helicopter, and how inadequate a replacement he is. She hasn't said it aloud, but she knows Raleigh has heard it nevertheless.

Dr. Sheehan clarifies. "My concern, with the kind of damage he's taken, is that he'll fight it, when the drift finally starts to fade, he'll do whatever it takes to keep you in his head. He's lost a lot—you both have, don't think for a moment I would trivialize your loss, Ranger—but he's stubborn. It's in his profile, he doesn't give up, I'm worried that when the time comes to disengage, he won't respect your need for autonomy, and..." She presses her lips together, shakes her head.

Mako carefully doesn't think about how _Raleigh_ isn't the one who has a problem with letting go, doesn't think about what that says about her, and doesn't consider even for a second of correcting Dr. Sheehan's misapprehension.

"I appreciate your concern, Doctor. I'm sure we'll be fine."

 

 

Twelve months after the world didn't end, after the invitations and the media scrutiny and the gathering of the survivors and the politicians courting their favors, after the speeches, Mako stands with Raleigh to steady him while the dizzy exhaustion from his anxiety medication passes and watches the room around them.

At her left, Tendo and Allison Choi catch up with a few of the other J-Tech grads from the class of 2016 and Kayla Calder, the other surviving pilot from Sydney SD. Mako remembers her vaguely from the Academy: they were both on the short list of people who made the mistake of sleeping with Chuck Hansen, but theirs was a heavily-populated Academy year and their COROs weren't close enough for them to have much use for each other otherwise.

"Won't piss around, it's rough as hell some days," Kayla says. "Not even, like... The legs are nothing, it's the, whatsit." She lifts her hands from the rests of her wheelchair and gestures around her head, her brown face creasing in displeasure.

"The hair?" Tendo offers.

"Oh eat me, Elvis," she says to Tendo, though she cracks a smile when she does. "We can't all have bloody perfect hair. It's more—Becket! You know how it is, you're supposed to go together or not at all, and _after_ , how that is?

Raleigh's attention is sluggish, but he understands immediately. "The silence," he says, and for a moment a long hush falls over the cluster of them. Everyone in the program has dead to mourn, but the pilots are a different case. Mako knows the statistics, the number of Jaeger pilots that technically survived their copilots is a very different figure than the number of them that outlived the war.

"Have you heard from Herc much?" Raleigh asks her. Kayla's face goes grim, and she smoothes the yellow silk of her dress over her knees, like the material will better conceal the nothing beneath it.

"Yeah, nah, he's..." She shakes her head and growls, frustrated, and Mako remembers also the statistics of former pilots with some sort of aphasia. Kayla finds her words, finally: "He's not gonna be one of the ones that come out the other side all right. Man's lost everything, his brother, wife, his kid, he had that thing with Pentecost." She nods to Mako, says, "Sorry about the Marshal, incidentally, but fuuuuuuuck. You've got your copilot at least, all Herc's got left is the fucking dog, and when Max goes..."

Even in such a large room, there's no missing Marshal Hercules Hansen. Mako's eyes find him immediately, across the room and ringed by politicians thick as hungry sharks. For all that his posture's straight and his uniform crisp, in spite of the smile he puts on for the photo with the Australian Prime Minister's wife, Mako thinks the only thing holding him up is the wall behind him. He looks hollowed out and pale, like he's going slowly transparent in front of everyone's eyes, like soon enough there will be nothing left of him at all.

"Iunno if you know how lucky you are to still have somebody," Kayla says to the both of them.

How lucky they are.

(Later that night, Raleigh fucks her like he can fuck love into her, like he still hopes. Yes, how _lucky_.)

 

 

 

Seventeen months after Mako refused to let Raleigh slip out of her head, he thinks a question, four short words, as he slides into sleep at her side; Mako bolts, takes a duffle and a credit card and charges the first outgoing flight.

As she boards the plane, her hands are shaking, and she tells herself it's because she won't say _yes_ and she can't tell him _no_. It's not about control, it isn't about losing control (or losing the one person who was allowed to tell her _more contr_ —no, not about that, she's better now, she _is_ ), it has nothing to do with being unable to tie her life to his and being unwilling to allow him to untangle his life from hers: it's none of those things. (It's all of those things.)

 _makomakowhereareyoumakoMAKOWHEREAREYOUGOING_ —

She clutches at the arm rests so that her fingers go white with strain and focuses on breathing like Sensei taught her.

 _Ichi, ni, san, yon_ —it will all be fine, she'll be fine, if her heart will just stop racing— _go, roku, shichi_ —she'll come back (maybe), she just needs a place to think where Raleigh won't hear her— _hachi, kyū, jū._ She tries to inhale and her breath catches, once, twice, again. Her heart skips a beat and her whole body goes cold. Mako sucks in a breath at last and chokes on it, tries to push it out of her lungs and can't.

She recognizes panic attacks, she's felt the echoes from Raleigh's, she knows intellectually that her ribs aren't collapsing, she isn't being crushed, she won't suffocate, but knowing something for fact can't talk down the adrenaline or the black spots in her vision. _Fight or flight instinct_ , she thinks, in small giddy terror, she hasn't chosen flight since she was thirteen years old and maybe there's a reason for that.

Mako goes under fighting, and when she wakes up again it's in a clean white room she doesn't recognize. There's an IV in her arm, plastic rails on the sides of her bed, and an annoying beeping sound somewhere to her right. Her head feels unusually heavy when she tries to turn it, but she manages eventually. Raleigh lies on a second hospital bed just a few feet to her right, covered in significantly more monitors and equipment. He looks gray and bruised and frail.

She tilts her head forward again, exhausted, and when she reopens her eyes the lights are dimmer and Dr. Sheehan stands in front of her bed with a dubious expression.

"Wh—" Mako starts, dry-mouthed and breathless.

"'Fine,' huh?"

Mako waits. Dr. Sheehan sighs.

"He had difficulty articulating and we've kept him sedated for the most part, but so far as I can guess he was looking for you when he had a seizure, fell, and concussed himself on the way down." She glances over at Raleigh, then back to Mako, and drums her fingers against the back of the clipboard in her hands. "You might be aware you had a panic attack, and that's a fairly lucky thing actually, because nobody knew to check in on Ranger Becket here before they grounded your plane in Portland. So."

Mako swallows against the bad taste in her mouth and the dryness and asks, "Why?"

"Why's that a good thing?"

Mako nods.

" _Well_ ," Dr. Sheehan says, drawing out the syllable, "for starters, it almost killed him. Intercranial bleeds are _such_ fun. So we're going to have to discuss whatever it is that inspired you to run, because this," she gestured between the two of them, "doesn't exactly meet any of the definitions of _fine_ , now does it?"

 

 

Two years _after_ , after the drift finally begins to give way, after Raleigh completely loses the ability to function outside Mako's presence and Mako cuts her hair to keep from tearing it out, after therapy and medication and two surgeries fail, Dr. Sheehan agrees, with reservations, to try them in a simulator.

In the drift, for a perfect moment, they're _whole_ , perfect and coherent, their fractures knit together and repaired as if they never were. She thinks, _I could have loved you_ , and Raleigh's answering hope feels li—

After, Dr. Sheehan apologizes. "I pulled you out as quickly as I could. "

Mako feels his absence differently now, like a wound made of white noise inside her skull, broken up by the occasional intruding flicker from Raleigh's sedated mind. "What happened?"

"There's a technical answer, but the short one involves axonal deterioration. I don't know what to tell you aside from be grateful the war's over. He might survive a simulator, but getting into a Jaeger would kill him."

Mako watches Raleigh's troubled face in sleep and takes his cold fingers between her own. She could have loved him for who he was, instead of hating him for who he wasn't; she had _tried_ to be grateful for him.

Two years ago, she knows from his memories, Sensei asked him where he'd rather die. Mako rubs her thumb across the back of his hand and feels a tiny awful spot of regret.

 

 

Three years after Pitfall, the nearly-defunct K-Watch Oahu Station 17 reports movement in the Breach. False alarms happened occasionally during the course of the war, so the lone engineer on duty thinks nothing of it, logs the incident and goes back to bed. An hour later, Tinian Station 4 reports movement; by dawn, five other stations report in, and the USS Pele and USS Grace Homer deploy from Guam to investigate. Both submarines sweep the Trench, but neither SONAR nor a beyond-cursory visual examination of the site reveal any unusual activity. Thirty-six hours later, the source of the alarms is revealed to be a combination of tectonic activity and improperly calibrated sensors, but by that time the damage is already done.

Mako turns off her ringing phone and flips through television channels at the house in Seattle, one channel after another calling in analysts and debating and speculating in circles.

"—ive us a straight answer, are we prepared for another kaiju incur—"

"—of the matter is, Oblivion Bay has more than eno—"

"—feel much safer if we had even one operationally-ready Jaeger, we have pilots to—"

Mako makes a considering face and turns toward the kitchen for a glass of water. When she returns, Raleigh stands in front of the television, a vertical wire strung tightly enough to fray. His shoulders tense and he goes rigid with her proximity when she steps to his side.

He flicks his gaze to her for a moment and says, "Don't get your hopes up."

"I wasn—"

_weren'tyou?_

She wasn't aware he could still hear her. She wonders what else he knows.

 

 

Four years after they closed it, the Breach reopens.

**Author's Note:**

> I AM REALLY, REALLY, REEEEEEEEEEEEEEALLY SORRY.
> 
> That being said, I appreciate feedback a lot, and if you still have the spoons after that, I'd really appreciate comments. I don't discount the possibility there are errors with the language, I did a lot of research for this but I am not by any means an expert on Japanese or kendo; mea culpa, any and all mistakes are mine. This was... not my usual oeuvre, not in the least, and oh god did it ever hurt. Thanks for making it to the end, I love you all forever.


End file.
